A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel

CHAPTER 1

Conspirators

“Father-in-law!” Camille gives a cry of delight. He points to Claude. “You see,” he invites the company, “never throw anything away. Any object, however outworn and old-fashioned, may prove to have its uses. Now, Citizen Duplessis, tell me, in short simple sentences, or verse, or comic song, how to run a ministry.”

“This is beyond my nightmares,” Claude says.

“Oh, they haven’t given me my own ministry—not quite yet—there will have to be a few more catastrophes before that happens. The news is this—Danton is Minister of Justice and Keeper of the Seals, and Fabre and I are his secretaries.”

“An actor.” Claude says. “And you. I do not like Danton. But I am sorry for him.”

“Danton is leader of the Provisional Government, so I must try to run the ministry for him, Fabre will not bother. Oh, I must write and tell my father, give me some paper quick. No, wait, I’ll write to him from the ministry, I’ll sit behind my big desk and send it under seal.”

“Claude,” Annette says, “where are your manners? Say congratulations.”

Claude shudders. “One point. A technicality. The Minister of Justice is also Keeper of the Seals, but he is only one person. He has always had the one secretary. Always.”

“Cheeseparing!” Camille says. “Georges-Jacques is above it! We shall be moving to the Place Vendôme! We shall be living in a palace!”

“Dear Father, don’t take it so badly,” Lucile begs.

“No, you don’t understand,” Claude tells her. “He has arrived now, he is the Establishment. Anyone who wants to make a revolution has to make it against him.”

Claude’s sense of dislocation is more acute than on the day the Bastille fell. So is Camille’s, when he thinks about what Claude has said. “No, that’s not true at all. There are plenty of good battles ahead. There’s Brissot’s people.”

“You like a good battle, don’t you?” Claude says. Briefly, he imagines an alternative world; into café conversation he drops the phrase “my son-in-law, the secretary.” The reality is, however, that his life has been wasted; thirty years of diligence have never made him intimate with a secretary, but now he is forced into intimacy by his mad womenfolk and the way they have decided to run their lives. Look at them all, rushing to give the secretary a kiss. He could, he supposes, cross the room and pat the secretary on the head; has he not seen the secretary sit, neck bent, while the minister-elect, discoursing on some patriotic theme, runs distrait strangler’s fingers through his curls? Will the minister do this in front of his civil servants? Claude takes an easy decision against any such display of affection. He glares at his son-in-law. Look at him—couldn’t you just commit violence? There he sits, lashes lowered, eyes on the carpet. What is he thinking? Is it anything a secretary should be thinking, at all?

Camille regards the carpet, but imagines Guise. The letter that he means to write is, in his mind, already written. Invisible, he floats across the Place des Armes. He melts through the closed front door of the narrow white house. He insinuates his presence into his father’s study. There, on the desk, lies the Encyclopedia of Law; by now, surely, we are in the lower reaches of the alphabet?

Yes, indeed—this is Vol. VI. On top of it lies a letter from Paris. In whose handwriting? In his own! In the handwriting his publishers complain of, in his own inimitable script! The door opens. In comes his father. How does he look? He looks as when Camille last saw him: he looks spare, gray, severe and remote.

He sees the letter. But wait, stop—how did it get there, how did it come to be lying on top of the Encyclopedia of Law? Implausible, this—unless he is to imagine a whole scene of the letter’s arrival, his mother or Clement or whoever carrying it up and managing not to slide their fingers and eyes into it.

All right, start again.

Jean-Nicolas climbs the stairs. Camille (in ghost form) drifts up behind him. Jean-Nicolas has a letter in his hand. He peers at it; it is the familiar, semi-legible handwriting of his eldest son.

Does he want to read it? No—not especially. But the rest of the household is calling up the stairs, what’s the news from Paris?

He unfolds it. With a little difficulty, he reads—but he will not mind the difficulty, when he comes to the news his son has to impart.

Amazement, glory! My son’s best friend (well, one of his two best friends) is made a Minister! My son is to be his secretary! He is to live in a palace!

Jean-Nicolas clasps the letter to his shirt front—an inch above his waistcoat, and to the left, above his heart. We have misjudged the boy! After all, he was a genius! I will run at once, tell everyone in town—they will be sick with spleen, they will look green, and puke with unadorned jealousy. Rose-Fleur’s father will be ill with grief. Just think, she might now be the secretary’s wife.

But no, no, Camille thinks—this is not at all how it will be. Will Jean-Nicolas seize his pen, dash off his congratulations? Will he toss his hat upon his severe gray locks, and dash out to waylay the neighbors? The hell he will. He’ll stare at the letter—going, oh no, oh no! He’ll think, what unimaginable form of behavior has procured this favor for my son? And pride? He’ll not feel pride. He’ll just feel suspicious, aggrieved. He’ll get a vague nagging pain in his lower back, and take to his bed.

“Camille, what are you thinking?” Lucile says.

Camille looks up. “I was thinking there’s no pleasing some people.”

The women give Claude poison-dart glances, and gather around and adore Camille.

“If I had failed,” Danton said, “I would have been treated as a criminal.”

It was twelve hours since Camille and Fabre had woken him up and told him to take charge of the nation. Dragged out of a disjointed dream of rooms and rooms, of doors and doors opening into other rooms, he had clutched Camille in incoherent gratitude—though perhaps it wasn’t the thing, perhaps a touch of nolo episcopari was in order? A touch of humility in the face of destiny? No—he was too tired to pretend reluctance. He commanded France, and this was a natural thing.

Across the river the urgent problem was the disposal of the bodies, both living and dead, of the Swiss Guard. Fires still smoked in the gutted palace.

“Keep the Seals?” Gabrielle had said. “Do you now what you’re doing? Camille couldn’t keep two white rabbits in a coop.”

Here Robespierre sat, very new, as if he had been taken out of a box and placed unruffled in a velvet armchair in Danton’s apartment. Danton called out to admit no one—“no one but my Secretaries of State”—and prepared to defer to the opinions of this necessary man.

“I hope you’ll help me out?” he said.

“Of course I will, Georges-Jacques.”

Very serious, Robespierre, very attentive; superlatively himself this morning when everyone should have woken up different. “Good,” Georges-Jacques said. “So you’ll take a post at the ministry?”

“Sorry. I can’t.”

“What do you mean, you can’t? I need you. Very well, you’ve got the Jacobins to run, you’ve a seat on the new Commune, but we’ve all got to—” The new minister broke off, and made a consolidating, squeezing gesture with his huge fists.

“If you want a Head of Civil Service, François Robert would do the job very well for you.”

“I’m sure he would.” Did you imagine, Danton thought, that I wanted to make you into a functionary? Of course I didn’t; I wanted to attach you in some highly paid but highly unofficial capacity, as my political adviser, my third eye, my third ear. So what’s the problem? Perhaps you are one of those people who’s made for opposition, not for government. Is that it? Or is it that you don’t want to work under me?

Robespierre looked up; light eyes, just touching his would-be master’s. “Let me off?” He smiled.

“As you wish.” So often he’s aware, these days, of his pseudo-refined barrister’s drawl, of the expressions that go with it; and of his other voice, his street voice, just as much the product of cultivation. Robespierre has only one voice, rather flat, unemphatic, ordinary; he’s never in his life seen the need to pretend. “But now, at the Commune, you’ll be taking hold of things there?” He tried to soften the tone to one of suggestion. “Fabre is a member, you should consider him at your orders.”

Robespierre seemed amused. “I’m not sure I’ve your taste for giving them.”

“Your first problem is the Capet family. Where are you going to keep them?”

Robespierre inspected his fingernails. “There was some suggestion that they should be kept under guard at the Minister of Justice’s palace.”

“Oh yes? And I suppose they’ll give me some attic, or perhaps a broom cupboard, to transact affairs of state from?”

“I said you wouldn’t like it.” Robespierre seemed interested to have his suspicions confirmed.

“They should be shut up in the old Temple tower.”

“Yes, that’s the view of the Commune. It’s a bit grim for the children, after what they’ve been used to.” Maximilien, Danton thought, were you once a child? “I’m told they’ll be made comfortable. They’ll be able to walk in the gardens. Perhaps the children would like to have a little dog they could take out?”

“Don’t ask me what they’d like,” Danton said. “How the hell would I know? Anyway, there are more pressing matters than the Capets. We have to put the city on a war footing. We have to take search powers, requisition powers. We have to round up any royalists who are still armed. The prisons are filling up.”

“That’s inevitable. The people who opposed us, this last week—we now define them as criminals, I suppose? They must have some status, we must define them somehow. And if they are defendants, we must offer them a trial—but it is rather puzzling this, because I am not sure what the crime would be.”

“The crime is being left behind by events,” Danton said. “And, of course, I am not some jurisprudential simpleton, I see that the ordinary courts will not do. I favor a special tribunal. You’ll sit as a judge? We’ll settle it later today. Now, we have to let the provinces know what’s happening. Any thoughts?”

“The Jacobins want to issue an agreed—”

“Version?”

“Is that your choice of word? Of course … People need to know what has happened. Camille will write it. The club will publish and distribute it to the nation.”

“Camille is good at versions,” Danton said.

“And then we must think ahead to the new elections. As things stand I don’t see how we can stop Brissot’s people being returned.”

His tone made Danton look up. “You don’t think we can work with them?”

“I think it would be criminal to try. Look, Danton, you must see where their policies tend. They are for the provinces and against Paris—they are federalists. They want to split the nation into little parts. If that happens, if they get their way, what chance have the French people against the rest of Europe?”

“A greatly reduced chance. None.”

“Just so. Therefore their policies tend to the destruction of the nation. They are treasonable. They conduce to the success of the enemy. Perhaps—who knows—perhaps the enemy has inspired them?”

Danton raised a finger. “Stop there. You’re saying, first they start a war, then they make sure we lose it? If you want me to believe that Pétion and Brissot and Vergniaud are agents of the Austrians, you’ll have to bring me proper proofs, legal proofs.” And even then, he thought, I won’t believe you.

“I’ll do my best,” Robespierre said: earnest schoolboy, pitting himself at the task. “Meanwhile, what are we going to do about the Duke?”

“Poor old Philippe,” Danton said. “He deserves something, after all his hard work. I think we should encourage the Parisians to elect him to the new Assembly.”

“National Convention,” Robespierre corrected. “Well, if we must.”

“And then there’s Marat.”

“What does he want?”

“Oh, he doesn’t ask anything, not for himself—I simply mean that he’s someone we must come to terms with. He has an enormous following among the people.”

“I accept that,” Robespierre said.

“You will have him with you at the Commune.”

“And the Convention? People will say Marat’s too extreme, Camille, too—but we must have them.”

“Extreme?” Danton said. “The times are extreme. Armies are extreme. This is a crisis point.”

“I don’t doubt it. God is with us. We have that comfort.”

Danton rolled around in his mind this astonishing statement. “Unfortunately,” he said at last, “God has not yet furnished us with any pikes.”

Robespierre turned his face away. It is like playing with a hedgehog, Danton thought, you just touch its nose and in it goes and all you’ve got to negotiate with is spikes. “I didn’t want this war,” Robespierre said.

“Unfortunately, we’ve got it, and we can’t keep insisting it belongs to somebody else.”

“Do you trust General Dumouriez?”

“He’s given us no reason not to.”

Robespierre’s mouth set in a wry line. “That’s not enough, is it? What has he done to convince us he’s a patriot?”

“He’s a soldier, there’s a presumption of loyalty to the government of the day.”

“That presumption was ill-founded in ’89, when the French Guards came over to the people. They followed their natural interests. Dumouriez and all our other dashing aristocratic officers will soon follow theirs. I wonder about Dillon, Camille’s friend.”

“I didn’t say the loyalty of the officers is assured, I said that the government takes it for granted till they show otherwise. On any other terms, it would be impossible to have an army.”

“May I give you a word of advice?” Robespierre’s eyes were fixed on Danton’s face, and Danton thought, this is not advice I shall like. “You begin to talk too much of ‘the government.’ You are a revolutionary, the Revolution made you, and in revolution the old presumptions do not hold good. In times of stability and peace it may be possible for a state to deal with its enemies by ignoring them, but in times such as these we have to identify them and take them on, tackle them.”

Tackle them how? Danton wondered. Reason with them? Convert them? Kill them? But you won’t have killing, will you, Max? You don’t hold with it. Out loud, he said, “Diplomacy can limit the war. While I’m in office I shall do what I can to keep England out. But when I’m not in office—”

“You know what Marat would say? He’d say, why should you ever be out of office?”

“But I intend to sit in the Convention. That’s my stage, that’s where I’ll be effective—you can’t mean to tie me to a desk. And as you know quite well, a deputy can’t be a minister.”

“Listen.” Robespierre eased out of a pocket his little volume of The Social Contract.

“Oh good, story time,” Danton said.

Robespierre opened it at a marked page. “Listen to this. ‘The inflexibility of the laws can in some circumstances make them dangerous and cause the ruin of a state in a crisis … if the danger is such that the machinery of the laws is an obstacle, then a dictator is appointed, who silences the laws.’” He closed the book, raised his eyes questioningly.

“Is that a statement of fact,” Danton inquired, “or is it prescriptive?”

Robespierre said nothing.

“I am afraid I am not impressed by that, just because you have read it out of a book. Even out of Jean-Jacques.”

“I want to prepare you for the arguments that people will throw at you.”

“You had the passage marked, I see. In future, don’t bother to draw the conversation round. Just ask me straight off what you want to know.”

“I didn’t come here to tempt you. I marked the passage because I have been giving the matter much thought.”

Danton stared at him blankly. “And your conclusion?”

“I like …” Robespierre hesitated. “I like to think around all the possible circumstances. We mustn’t be doctrinaire. But then, pragmatism can so easily degenerate into lack of principle.”

“They kill dictators,” Danton said. “In the end.”

“But if, before that happens, you have saved your country? ‘It is expedient that one man should die for the people.’”

“Forget it. I’ve no desire to be a martyr. Have you?”

“It’s all hypothetical anyway. But you and I, Danton … You and I,” he said thoughfully, “are not alike.”

“I wonder what Robespierre really thinks of me?” Danton said to Camille.

“Oh, he thinks you’re wonderful.” Camille smiled as best he could in his rather nervous and distracted state. “He can’t praise you too highly.”

“I’d like to know how Danton really regards me,” Robespierre said.

“Oh, he can’t praise you too highly.” Camille’s smile was a little strained. “He thinks you’re wonderful.”

Life’s going to change. You thought it already had? Not nearly as much as it’s going to change now.

Everything you disapprove of you’ll call “aristocratic.” This term can be applied to food, to books and plays, to modes of speech, to hairstyles and to such venerable institutions as prostitution and the Roman Catholic Church.

If “Liberty” was the watchword of the first Revolution, “Equality” is that of the second. “Fraternity” is a less assertive quality, and must creep in where it may.

All persons are now plain “Citizen” or “Citizeness.” The Place Louis XV will become the Place de la Revolution, and the scientific beheading machine will be set up there; it will become known as the “guillotine,” in tribute to Dr. Guillotin the noted public-health expert. The rue Monsieur-de-Prince will become the rue Liberté, the Place de la Croix-Rouge will become the Place de la Bonnet-Rouge. Notre Dame will become the Temple of Reason. Bourg-la-Reine will become Bourg-la-République. And in the fullness of time, the rue des Cordeliers will become the rue Marat.

Divorce will be very easy.

For a time, Annette Duplessis will continue to walk in the Luxembourg Gardens. A cannon factory will be set up there; the patriotic din and stench will be beyond belief, and the patriotic waste products will be tipped into the Seine.

The Luxembourg Section will become the Section Mutius Scaevola. The Romans are very fashionable. So are the Spartans. The Athenians less so.

In at least one provincial town, Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro will be banned, just as the King once banned it. It depicts a style of life now outlawed; also, it requires the wearing of aristocratic costumes.

“Sansculottes,” the working men call themselves, because they wear trousers not breeches. With them, a calico waistcoat with broad tricolor stripes: a hip-length jacket of coarse wool, called a carmagnole. On the sansculotte head, the red bonnet, the “cap of liberty.” Why liberty is thought to require headgear is a mystery.

For the rich and powerful, the aim is to be accepted as sansculotte in spirit, without assuming the ridiculous uniform. But only Robespierre and a handful of others keep hope alive for the unemployed hairdressers of France. Many members of the new Convention will wear their hair brushed forward and cut straight across their foreheads, like the statues of heroes of antiquity. Riding boots are worn on all occasions, even at harp recitals. Gentlemen have the air of being ready to run down a Prussian column after dinner, any day of the week.

Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of ’94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck.

There will be economic controls, price maximums imposed by the government. There will be coffee riots and sugar riots. One month there will be no firewood, then it will be no soap, or no candles. The black market will be a flourishing but desperate business, with the death penalty for hoarders and traffickers.

There will be persistent rumors about ci-devant lords and ladies, returned émigrés. Someone has seen a marquis working as a bootblack, his wife taking in sewing. A duke is employed as a footman in his own house, which now belongs to a Jewish banker. Some people like to think these things are true.

In the National Assembly there were deplorable occasions when overwrought gentlemen placed hands on rapier hilts. In the Convention and the Jacobin Club, fist and knife fights will be quite common. Dueling will be replaced by assassination.

For the rich—the new rich, that is—it is possible to live as well as one would have liked to under the old regime. Camille Desmoulins, in semi-private conversation at the Jacobins, one evening in ’93: “I don’t know why people complain about not being able to make money nowadays. I have no trouble.”

Churches will be despoiled, statues disfigured. Stone-eyed saints raise stumps of fingers in truncated benediction. If you want to save a statue of the Virgin, you put a red cap on her head and turn her into a Goddess of Liberty. And that’s the way all the virgins save themselves; who wants these ferocious political women?

Because of the changes in the street names, it will become impossible to direct people around the city. The calendar will be changed too; January is abolished, good-bye to aristocratic June. People will ask each other, “What’s today in real days?”

’92, ’93 ’94. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death.

Danton’s first action at the Ministry of Justice was to call together his senior civil servants. He surveyed them. A grin split his broken face. “I advise you gentlemen,” he said, “to take up the option of early retirement.”

“I’ll miss you terribly,” Louise Gély said to Gabrielle. “Shall I come and see you at the Place Vendôme?”

“The Place des Piques,” Gabrielle corrected. She smiled: a very small smile. “Yes, of course you must come. And we will be back soon, because Georges has only taken office for the Emergency, and when the Emergency is over—” She bit the words back. Tempting fate, she called it.

“You shouldn’t be frightened,” Louise said, hugging her gently. “You should have a look in your eyes which says, I know that while my husband is in the city the enemy cannot come.”

“Well, Louise … you are brave.”

“Danton believes it.”

“But can one man do so much by himself?”

“It’s not a question of one man.” She moved away. Hard sometimes not to be irritated by Gabrielle. “It’s a question of many men with the best leader.”

“I didn’t think you liked my husband.”

Louise raised her eyebrows. “When did I say I did? All the same, it is good of him to do something for my father.”

M. Gély had a new post at the Ministry of Marine.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” Gabrielle said. “He’s found places for all the people who used to be his clerks, and—oh, everybody really. Even Collot d’Herbois, whom we don’t like.”

“And are they duly grateful?” Probably not, Louise thought. “People he likes, people he doesn’t like, people of no importance whatever—I think he’d give the whole city a job, if he could. It’s interesting. I was wondering why he has sent Citizen Fréron off to Metz?”

“Oh,” she said uneasily, “it’s to do with the Executive Council there—they need some help running their revolution, I suppose.”

“Metz is on the frontier.”

“Yes.”

“I was wondering if he’d done it as a favor to Citizeness Desmoulins. Fréron was always following her around, wasn’t he? And giving her soulful glances, and paying her compliments. Danton doesn’t like it. It will make life easier for him, now that Fréron’s away.”

Gabrielle wouldn’t, out of choice, be having this conversation. Even this child notices, she thinks, even this child of fourteen knows all about it.

When the news of the coup of August 10 reached his military headquarters, General Lafayette tried to organize his armies to march on Paris and bring down the Provisional Government. Only a handful of officers were prepared to back him. On August 19 he crossed the border near Sedan, and was promptly taken prisoner by the Austrians.

The Ministry of Justice had taken to having breakfast together, to work out the plan for the day. Danton greeted everyone except his wife, but after all, he had seen her before that morning. This would have been the time to make the change to separate rooms, they both thought; but neither had the heart to mention it first. Consequently, the usual conjugal arrangements were made; they woke up beneath a coronet and a canopy, stifled by velvet bed curtains thicker than Turkey carpets.

Lucile was wearing gray this morning. Dove-gray: piquantly puritanical, Danton thought. He imagined leaning across and kissing her savagely on the mouth.

Nothing affected Danton’s appetite—not a sudden seizure of lust, not the national emergency, not the historic dust of the state bed curtains. Lucile ate nothing. She was starving herself, trying to get back pre-pregnancy angles. “You’ll fade away, girl,” Danton told her.

“She’s trying to look like her husband,” Fabre explained. “She will not admit to it, but for some reason best known to herself that is what she is doing.”

Camille sipped a small cup of black coffee. His wife watched him covertly as he opened their letters—nasty little slits with a paperknife, and his long elegant fingers. “Where are François and Louise?” Fabre asked. “Something must be detaining them. How quaint they are, always waking up side by side and always in the bed they started off in.”

“Enough!” Danton said. “We shall have a rule, no lubricious gossip before breakfast.”

Camille put down his coffee cup. “For you it may be before breakfast, but some of us are anxious to begin on our daily ration of scandal, backbiting and malice.”

“We must hope the gracious atmosphere of the place will seep into us in time. Even into Fabre.” Danton turned to him. “It won’t be like living among the Cordeliers, with your every little depravity applauded as soon as you step out of doors.”

“I’m not depraved,” Fabre complained. “Camille’s depraved. Incidentally, I suppose it will be all right for Caroline Rémy to move in?”

“No,” Danton said. “It won’t be all right at all.”

“Why not? Hérault won’t mind, he can call round.”

“I don’t give a damn whether he minds or not. Do you think you’re going to turn the place into a brothel?”

“Are you serious?” Fabre demanded. He looked at Camille for support, but Camille was reading his letters.

“Divorce your Nicole, marry Caroline, and she’ll be welcome.”

“Marry her?” Fabre said. “You’re certainly not serious.”

“Well, if it’s so unthinkable, she shouldn’t be in the company of our wives.”

“Oh, I see.” Fabre was belligerent. Quite right too; he can’t believe what he’s hearing. The minister and his colleague the other secretary have both availed themselves of Caro quite frequently, this summer. “There’s one law for you,” he says, “and quite another for me.”

“I don’t know what you mean. Am I proposing to keep a mistress on the premises?”

“Yes,” Fabre muttered.

Camille laughed out loud.

“Please realize,” Danton said, “that if you move Caro in here, the ministries and the Assembly will know about it in an hour, and it will bring down on us—on me—some very severe and justified criticism.”

“Very well,” Fabre said resentfully. “Change the subject. Do you want to hear what Condorcet has to say about your elevation, Minister, in today’s paper?”

“I hope you won’t edify us with Brissotin ramblings every morning,” Lucile said. “However. Go on.”

Fabre unfolded the sheet. “‘The Chief Minister had to be someone who possessed the confidence of the agitators lately responsible for overthrowing the monarchy. He had to be a man with sufficient personal authority to control this most advantageous, glorious and necessary Revolution’s most contemptible instruments.’ That’s us, Camille. ‘He had to be a man of such eloquence, spirit and character that he would demean neither the office he held nor those members of the National Assembly called upon to have dealings with him. Danton only combined these qualities. I voted for him, and I do not regret my decision.’” Fabre leaned over to Gabrielle. “There now—aren’t you impressed by that?”

“Something grudging in the middle,” Camille said.

“Patronizing.” Lucile reached out to take the paper from Fabre. “‘Called upon to have dealings with him.’ It sounds as if you’d be in a cage and they’d poke you with a long stick through the bars. And their teeth would chatter.”

“As if it mattered,” Camille said, “whether Condorcet regretted his decision. As if he had a choice, in the first place. As if Brissotin opinion mattered to anyone.”

“You will find it matters when the National Convention is elected,” Danton said.

“I like that bit about your character,” Fabre said. “What if he’d seen you dragging Mandat through City Hall?”

“Let’s try and forget that,” Danton said.

“Oh—and I thought it was one of your better moments, Georges-Jacques.”

Camille had sorted his letters into little piles. “Nothing from Guise,” he said.

“Perhaps they’re overawed by the new address.”

“I think they simply don’t believe me. They think it’s one of my elaborate lies.”

“Don’t they get the newspapers?”

“Yes, but they know better than to believe what they read in the newspapers, thank goodness. Now that I write for them. You know, my father thinks I shall be hanged.”

“You may be yet,” Danton said, jocular.

“This may interest you. A letter from my dear cousin Fouquier-Tinville.” Camille cast an eye over his relative’s best handwriting. “Squirm, flattery, abasement, squirm, dearest sweetest Camille, squirm squirm squirm … ‘the election of the Patriot Ministers … I know them all by reputation, but I am not so happy as to be known by them—’”

“He’s known by me,” Danton said. “Useful fellow. Does as he’s told.”

“‘I flatter myself that you will put forward my interests to the Minister of Justice to procure me a situation … you know I am the father of a large family and not well-off … .’ There.” He dropped the letter in front of Danton. “I put forward the interest of my humble and obedient servant Antoine Fouquier-Tinville. He is spoken of in the family as a perfectly competent lawyer. Employ him if you choose.”

Danton picked up the letter. He laughed. “The servility, Camille! Just think—three years ago this spring, would he have given you the time of day?”

“Absolutely not. Wouldn’t have been related to me even remotely, until the Bastille fell.”

“Still,” Danton said, reading the letter, “your cousin might be useful for our special tribunal that we are setting up to try the losers. Leave it with me, I’ll find him something to do.”

“What are those?” Lucile indicated the other pile of letters.

“Those were ingratiating.” Camille waved a hand. “These are obscene.” Her attention fastened on the hand; it looked almost transparent. “You know, I used to give such correspondence to Mirabeau. He kept a file.”

“Can I see?” Fabre asked.

“Later,” Danton said. “Does Robespierre get these things?”

“Yes, a few. Maurice Duplay sifts them out. Of course, the household is wonderful prey for the avid imagination. All those daughters, and the two young boys. Maurice gets very cross. I’m often mentioned, it seems. He complains to me. As if I could do anything about it.”

“Robespierre should get married,” Fabre said.

“It doesn’t seem to help.” Danton turned to his wife, mock-uxurious. “What are you going to do today, my love?” Gabrielle didn’t reply. “Your zest for life is unbounded, isn’t it?”

“I miss my home,” Gabrielle said. She looked down at the tablecloth. She did not care to have her private life in public.

“Why don’t you go and spend some money?” her husband suggested. “Take your mind off it. Go to the dressmakers, or whatever it is you do.”

“I’m three months pregnant. I’m not interested in dresses.”

“Don’t be horrible to her, Georges-Jacques,” Lucile said softly.

Gabrielle threw back her head and glared at her. “I don’t need your protection, you little slut.” She got up from the table. “Excuse me, please.” They watched her go.

“Forget about it, Lolotte,” Danton said. “She’s not herself.”

“Gabrielle has the temperament of these letter writers,” Fabre said. “She views everything in the worst possible light.”

Danton pushed the letters towards Fabre. “Quench your burning curiosity. But take them away.”

Fabre made Lucile an extravagant bow, and left the room with alacrity.

“He won’t like them,” Danton said. “Not even Fabre will like them.”

“Max has marriage proposals,” Camille said unexpectedly. “He gets two or three a week. He keeps them in his room, tied up with tape. He files everything, you know.”

“This is one of your fantasies,” Danton said.

“No, I assure you. He keeps them under his mattress.”

“How do you know?” Danton said narrowly.

They began to laugh. “Don’t go spreading this story,” Camille said, “because Max will know where it comes from.”

Gabrielle reappeared, standing in the doorway, sullen and tense. “When you are finished, I’d like to speak to my husband, just for one moment. If you can spare him?”

Danton got up. “You can be Minister of Justice today,” he said to Camille, “and I shall deal with what Gabrielle calls ‘the foreign business.’ Yes, my love, what was it you wanted?”

“Oh, hell,” Lucile said, when they’d gone. “Slut, am I?”

“She doesn’t mean anything. She’s very unhappy, she’s very confused.”

“We don’t help, do we?”

“Well, what do you suggest?”

Their hands touched, lightly. They were not going to give up the game.

The allies were on French soil. “Paris is so safe,” Danton told the Assembly, “that I have brought my infant sons and my aged mother to Paris, to my apartment in the Place des Piques.”

He met Citizen Roland in the Tuileries garden; they strolled among the trees. A green, dappled light fretted his colleague’s face. Citizen Roland’s voice shook. “Perhaps this is the time to go. The government must stay together, at all costs. If we were to move beyond the Loire, then perhaps, when Paris is taken—”

Danton turned on him ferociously. “Take care when you talk about running away, Roland—the people might hear you. Go on then, old man, you run. If you’ve no stomach for a fight you take yourself off. But I go nowhere, Roland, I stay here and govern. Paris taken? It’ll never be taken. We’ll burn it first.”

You know how fear spreads? Danton thinks there must be a mechanism for it, a process that is part of the human brain or soul. He hopes that, by the same process, along the same pathways, courage can spread; he will stand at the center, and it can go out from him.

Mme. Recordain sat in a high-backed chair and surveyed the opulence of the Minister of Justice’s palace. She sniffed.

They began digging trenches round the city walls.

In the first weeks of the ministry, Dr. Marat often called. He disdained to bathe for these occasions, and refused to make an appointment; hopping through the galleries with his nervous, contorted stride, he would enunciate, “The minister, the secretary,” with a sort of disgust, and physically grapple with anyone who tried to stop him.

This morning two senior officials were conferring outside Secretary Desmoulins’s door. Their faces were aggrieved, their tones indignant. They made no effort to stop Marat. He deserves you, their expressions said.

It was a large and splendid room, and Camille was the least conspicuous thing in it. The walls were lined with portraits, aged to the colors of tallow and smoke; the grave ministerial faces, under their wigs and powder, were all alike. They gazed without expression at the occupant of a desk which had once perhaps been theirs: it is all one to us, we are dead. It seemed to give them no trouble to overlook Camille, no trouble whatsoever.

“Longwy has fallen,” Marat said.

“Yes, they told me. There is a map over there, they gave it to me because I don’t know where anything is.”

“Verdun next,” Marat said. “Within the week.” He sat down opposite Camille. “What’s the problem with your civil servants? They’re standing out there muttering.”

“This place is stifling. I wish I were running a newspaper again.”

Marat was not, at this time, publishing his own newspaper in the ordinary way; instead, he was writing his opinions on wall posters, and posting them up through the city. It was not a style to encourage subtlety, close argument; it made a man, he said, economical with his sympathies. He surveyed Camille. “You and I, sunshine, are going to be shot.”

“That had occurred to me.”

“What will you do, do you think? Will you break down and beg for mercy?”

“I expect so,” Camille said realistically.

“But your life is worth something. Mine, too, though I wouldn’t expect many people to agree. We have a duty to the Revolution, at this point. Brunswick is fully mobilized. What does Danton say? The position is desperate, not hopeless. He is not a fool, I take him to have some grounds for hope. But Camille, I am afraid. The enemy say they will devastate the city. People will suffer, you know, as perhaps they never have in all our history. Can you imagine the revenge the royalists will take?”

Camille shook his head, meaning, I try not to.

“Provence and Artois will be back. Antoinette. She will resume her state. The priests will be back. Children now in their cradles will suffer for what their fathers and mothers did.” Marat leaned forward, his body hunched, his eyes intent, as he did when he spoke from the tribune at the Jacobins. “It will be an abattoir, an abattoir of a nation.”

Camille put his elbows on the desk, and watched Marat. He could not imagine what Marat expected him to say.

“I don’t know how the enemy advance may be stopped,” Marat said. “I leave that to Danton and to the soldiers. It is this city that is my business, it is the traitors within, the subversives, the royalists packed into our prisons. These prisons are not secure—you know very well, we have people shut up in convents, in hospitals, we have not places enough for them, or any way of keeping them secure.”

“Pity we knocked the Bastille down,” Camille said. “I suppose.”

“And if they break out?” Marat said. “No, I am not being fanciful—the weapon of imprisonment, the whole notion of it, demands some assent from the victim, some cooperation. Suppose that cooperation is withdrawn? As our troops join battle, leaving the city to women and children and politicians, the aristocrats pour out of the prisons, locate their arms caches—”

“Arms caches? Don’t be stupid. Why do you think the Commune has been making house-to-house searches?”

“And can you swear to me that they’ve missed nothing?”

Camille shook his head. “So what do you want us to do? Go into the prisons and kill them all?”

“At last,” Marat said. “I thought we should never arrive.”

“In cold blood?”

“However you like.”

“And you’ll organize this, will you, Marat?”

“Oh no, it would just happen spontaneously. The people, you see, being in such terror, being so inflamed against their enemies—”

“Spontaneously?” Camille said. “Oh, very likely.” And yet, he thought: we have a city that is in immediate peril, we have a populace that is enraged, we have a sea of futile unfocused hatred slapping at the institutions of state and washing through the public squares, and we have victims, we have the focus for that hate, we have traitors ready, to hand—yes, it became more likely, by the minute.

“Oh, come on, man,” Marat said. “We both know how these things are done.”

“We have already begun putting the royalists on trial,” he said.

“Have we got a year or two, do you think? Have we got a month? Have we got a week?”

“No. No, I see what you mean. But Marat, we’ve never—I mean, we never contracted ourselves for this sort of thing. It’s murder, whichever way you look at it.”

“Take your hands away from your face. Hypocrite. What do you think we did in .’89? Murder made you. Murder took you out of the back streets and put you where you sit now. Murder! What is it? It’s a word.”

“I shall tell Danton what you advise.”

“Yes. You do that.”

“But he will not connive at it.”

“Let him suit himself. It will happen anyway. Either we control it as far as we can or it happens outside and beyond our control. Danton must be either master or servant—which will he be?”

“He will lose his good name. His honor.”

“Oh, Camille,” Marat said softly. “His honor!” He shook his head. “Oh, my poor Camille.”

Camille threw himself back in his chair, looked at the ceiling, looked at the faces that lined the room; the ministers’ eyes were dull beneath their patina, the whites pickled by age. Had they wives, children? Had they feelings at all? Beneath their embroidered waistcoats, had the ribs moved, had the hearts ever beat? The portraits stared back at him; they made no sign. The officials had removed themselves from beyond the door. He could hear a clock, hear the minutes ticking away. “The people have no honor,” Marat said. “They have never been able to afford it. Honor is a luxury.”

“Suppose the other ministers prevent it?”

“Other ministers? Spare me that. What are the other ministers? Eunuchs.”

“Danton will not like this.”

“He doesn’t have to like it,” Marat said fiercely, “he has to see the necessity. That would be easy for him, I should think—a child can see the necessity. Like it? Do you think I like it?” Camille didn’t answer. Marat paused for thought. “Well, I don’t mind it,” he said. “I don’t mind it at all.”

The preliminaries for elections to the Convention have already begun. It seems, then, that life is going forward. Bread is being baked for the next day, plays are in rehearsal.

Lucile has her baby back; infant cries echo through the grand suites, under the painted ceilings, among the documents and the leather-bound law books, where no baby has ever cried before.

Verdun falls on September 1. The enemy, if they choose now to advance on Paris, are two days’ march away.

Robespierre: he kept thinking of Mirabeau now, of how that man had always said, with a great sweep of his arm, “Mirabeau will do this,” or, “the Comte de Mirabeau will answer …”: speaking of himself like a character in a play he was directing. He is conscious now of eyes upon him: Robespierre acts. Or, Robespierre does not act. Robespierre sits still and watches them watching him.

He had refused to sit as a judge on Danton’s special tribunal. He caught the flash of annoyance on Danton’s face: “You are still against the death penalty then, my friend?” And yet, Danton himself had been merciful. There had been very little work for Citizen Sanson. An officer of the National Guard had been executed—by the new beheading machine—and so had the Secretary of the Civil List, but there was an aristo journalist whose death sentence had not been carried out. Camille had slid his hands onto Danton’s tired shoulders and said coaxingly that it was a bad precedent to execute journalists. Danton had laughed: “As you wish. You can’t rescind the verdict, so keep postponing the execution. We’ll lose the man in the system somewhere. Do what you think best, you have my signature stamp.”

It was, in other words, arbitrary: the man’s life depending, Fabre said, on Camille remembering a victory in some exchange of insults with him in ’89, and so feeling magnanimous, and then putting on his cheap-tart act to amuse Danton and cajole him back into a good humor at the end of a hard day. (A secret, Fabre said, that Camille could profitably sell to Danton’s wife.) Fabre was sour about the incident: not, Robespierre thought, because he had a passion for justice, but because he had no similar means of getting his own way. Was he, Robespierre, alone in feeling that the law should not be used and abused like this? It caused a minute revulsion in him, an intellectual flinching. But this feeling came from the old days, before the Revolution. Justice was the servant of policy now; no other position was compatible with survival. Yet it would have sickened him to hear Danton bellowing for heads, like that devil Marat. If anything, Danton lacked energy: was susceptible to individual blandishments, and not just from Camille.

Brissot. Vergniaud. Buzot. Condorcet. Roland. Roland, and Brissot again. In his dreams they wait, laughing, to catch him in a net. And Danton will not act …

These are the conspirators: why, he asked (since he is a reasonable man), does he fear conspiracy where no one else does?

And answered, well, I fear what I have past cause to fear. And these are the conspirators within: the heart that flutters, the head that aches, the gut that won’t digest, and eyes that, increasingly, cannot bear bright sunlight. Behind them is the master conspirator, the occult part of the mind; nightmares wake him at half-past four, and then there is nothing to do but lie in a hopeless parody of sleep until the day begins.

To what end is this inner man conspiring? To take a night off and read a novel? To have more friends, to be liked a bit more? But people said, have you seen how Robespierre has taken to those tinted spectacles? It certainly gives him a sinister air.

Danton wore a scarlet coat. He stood before the Assembly. People cheered; some wept. The noise from the galleries could be heard across the river.

Huge resonant voice in easy command: breathing as Fabre taught him. Two trains of thought running quietly in his head: plans laid, armies deployed, diplomatic maneuvers set afoot; my generals can hold them for a fortnight, and after that (he said in his head), after that I do something else, after that I sell them the Queen if they would buy, or my mother, or I surrender, or I slit my throat.

The second train of thought: actions are being manufactured out of speech. How can words save a country? Words make myths, it seems, and for their myths people fight to win. Louise Gély: “You have to direct them what to do. Once they know what attitude to take, how to face the situation, it is easy for them.” She is so right, the child … the situation is simple. Even a fourteen-year-old can grasp it. Simple words are needed. Few, and short. He draws himself up, puts out a hand to his audience. “Dare,” he says. “Always dare. And again, dare. In this way you will save France.”

At that moment, someone wrote, that hideous man was beautiful.

He felt then like a Roman emperor, present at his own deification. Living gods walk in the streets now: avatars load the cannon, icons load the dice.

Legendre: “The enemy was at the gates of Paris. Danton came, and he saved the country.”

It is very late. Marat’s face, in candlelight, looks livid, drowned. Fabre has found things to laugh at. He has a bottle of brandy at his elbow. At this stage there are perhaps a dozen people in the room. They had not greeted each other by name, and tried to avoid each other’s eyes. Perhaps a year from now they won’t be able to swear to who was there and who wasn’t. An affectedly plebeian Section leader sits by an open window, because the meeting doesn’t like the smell of his pipe.

“It won’t be arbitrary,” a man from the Commune says. “We’ll have trusted patriots, men from the Sections, and we’ll equip them with the full lists. They’ll be able to interview each prisoner, release any innocent persons whom we’ve not already let go and pass sentence on the others. What do you think?”

“I think it’s fine,” Marat says. “As long as there is only one possible sentence.”

“Do you think it will do any good, this travesty?” Camille asks the man from the Commune. “Don’t you think you may as well just wade in and slaughter people indiscriminately?”

Marat says, “No doubt that is what will happen in the end, anyway. We must have the semblance of form. But quickly, citizens, we have to move quickly. The people are hungry and thirsty for justice.”

“Oh, Marat,” Camille says. “Let us have an end to your slogans.”

The sansculotte with the pipe takes it out of his mouth. “You’re not really very good at this, Camille, are you? Why don’t you just go home?”

Camille’s finger stabs at the papers on the table. “This is my business, it’s the minister’s business.”

“Look, if it helps you,” the sansculotte says, “just think of it as an extension of what we did on August 10. On that day we started something; now we’re finishing it. What’s the point of founding a republic if you can’t take the action needed to maintain it?”

“I tell him this and tell him this,” Marat says quietly. “I tell him and tell him. Stupid boy.”

At the center of the table, like a prize, is the Minister of Justice’s signature stamp. This is all that is needed to release a man or a woman from prison. It’s true that Citizen Roland, as Minister of the Interior, should have some say in what happens in the gaols. But the feeling is that Roland neither knows nor cares; cares, but doesn’t know; knows, but doesn’t care; cares, but doesn’t dare do anything about it. What does Roland matter anyway? One more pressing decision might give him a heart attack.

“To our lists,” says Citizen Hébert.

The lists are very long. There are about two thousand people in the prisons, after all; it’s difficult to establish an exact number, there are a lot of people unaccounted for. Whoever is struck from the lists will be let out tonight; the others must take their chances, stand before their impromptu judges.

They come to a priest, one Bérardier. “I want him released,” Camille says.

“A refractory priest, who has refused the oath to the constitution—”

“Released,” Camille says fiercely. They shrug, stamp the order. Camille is unpredictable, it does not do to frustrate him too much; besides, there is always the possibility that a given person is a government agent, an undercover man. Danton has scribbled his own list of people to be released, and given it to Fabre. Camille asks to see it; Fabre refuses. Camille suggests that Fabre has altered it. Fabre asks what he is taken for. No one answers. Fabre insinuates that a middle-aged barrister whose release Camille has obtained had been one of his lovers in the early ’80s when he was very pretty and not very prosperous. Camille snaps back that it might be so but that is better than saving somebody’s life for a fat fee, which Fabre is probably doing. “Fascinating,” Hébert says. “Shall we go on to the next sheet?”

Messengers wait outside the door, to carry urgent orders for release. It is difficult, when the pen skips over a name, to associate it with the corpse it might belong to, tomorrow or the day after that. There is no sense of evil in the room, just tiredness and the aftertaste of petty squabbling. Camille drinks quite a lot of Fabre’s brandy. Towards daybreak, a kind of dismal camaraderie sets in.

There had been, of course, the matter of who should do the killing, and it would obviously not be the men with the lists, not even the sansculotte with the pipe. It was thought advisable to recruit a number of butchers, and promise them a rate for the job. The intention was not mocking or macabre, but sound and humane.

Unfortunately, as the rumors of an aristo plot spread panic through the city, enthusiastic beginners joined in. They lacked skill, and the butchers tut-tutted over their small knowledge of anatomy. Unless it was their intention to torture and mutilate.

Exasperation at midday: “We might as well not have bothered sitting up all night over those lists,” Fabre says. “I’m sure the wrong people are being killed.”

Camille thinks of what Marat said: either we control it ourselves or it happens outside and beyond our control. It seems, as the unspeakable news comes in, hour by hour, that we have got the worst of both worlds. We will never, now, know an hour free from guilt; we will never, now, recover such reputation as we possessed; yet we neither planned nor willed the whole of it, the half of it. We simply turned away, we washed our hands, we made a list and we followed an agenda, we went home to sleep while the people did their worst and the people (Camille thinks) were translated from heroes to scavengers, to savages, to cannibals.

In the early stages at least, there was some attempt at order, some pretense, however risible, of legality. A group of sansculottes, red-capped, armed, behind the largest table they can find, the suspect before them: outside, the courtyard where the executioners wait, with cutlasses, axes, pikes. They set half of the suspects free—for a reason, or out of sentimentality, or because a mistake of identity has been found out just in time. The whole question of identification becomes more muddled as the day wears on, people claiming to have lost their papers or to have had them stolen; but anyone in prison must be there for a reason, isn’t that so, and that reason must be against the public good, and as one man said, all aristos look the same to me, I can’t tell their faces apart.

Some people know they are condemned; some have time to pray, and others die struggling and screaming, fighting to their last breath. An irate killer stamps in to the tribunal—“Use your heads, give us a bloody chance, can’t you? We can’t keep up.” So the prisoners are waved away airily by their judges—“Go, you’re free.” Outside the door a steady man waits to fell them. Freedom is the last thing they know.

Mid-afternoon: Prudhomme, the journalist, waited for Danton’s meeting to break up. He did not know that Danton had laughed at the representations of the Supervisor of Prisons, or that he had sworn at Roland’s private secretary. Since that day in ’91, when a pack of National Guardsmen had thought he was Camille and nearly killed him, Prudhomme had felt himself entitled to take an interest in Danton and his friends.

Danton’s eyes took him in: somewhat blankly. “The prisoners are being massacred,” Prudhomme said to him.

“Fuck the prisoners. They must look after themselves.” He strode away. Camille looked closely at Prudhomme, failing, as he always did, to transpose Prudhomme’s fading scars onto his own face.

“It’s all right,” he said. He looked nervously guilty; it was the effect of Prudhomme, rather than the larger situation. He brushed one of Prudhomme’s clenched hands with his own. “It’s all organized. No one who is innocent will be touched. If his Section vouch for a prisoner, he’ll be set free. It’s—”

“Camille.” Danton stopped, turned around and bellowed at him. “For God’s sake, come here, hurry up.”

He would have liked to hit him. Or hit Prudhomme. His official attitude was: I don’t know anything about this.

The Princesse de Lamballe was murdered at La Force prison. Possibly she was raped. When the mob had torn out most of her internal organs and stuck them on pikes, they cut off her head and carried it to a hairdresser. At knife point they forced the nauseated man to curl and dress the Princesse’s pretty fair hair. Then they marched in procession to the Temple, where the Capet family were locked up. They put the head on a pike and hoisted it up to sway outside the high windows. “Come and say hallo to your friend,” they exhorted the woman inside.

Voltaire: “Reason must first be established in the minds of the leaders then gradually it descends and at length rules the people, who are unaware of its existence, but who, perceiving the moderation of their rulers, learn to imitate them.”

Nine ways by which one may share in the guilt of another’s sin:

By counsel

By command

By consent

By provocation

By praise or flattery

By concealment

By being a partner in the sin

By silence

By defending the ill deed.

When Robespierre spoke, the members of the Commune’s Watch Committee put down their pens and looked straight at him. They did not fidget with their papers, blow their noses or allow their eyes to wander. If they had coughs, they suppressed them. They squared their shoulders and put conscientious expressions on their faces. He expected their attention, so he got it.

There was a plot, Robespierre told them, to put the Duke of Brunswick on the throne of France. Incredible as it might seem—he looked around the room, and no one allowed incredulity to show on his face—the allied commander had such ambitions, and Frenchmen were furthering them. He named Brissot.

Billaud-Varennes, Danton’s former clerk, spoke at once to back him up. Whined rather, Max thought; he did not like Billaud. The man claimed a startling ability: he said he could recognize a conspirator by looking him straight in the eye.

The officials of the Commune drew up warrants for the immediate arrest of Brissot and Roland. Robespierre went home.

Eléonore Duplay caught him as he crossed the courtyard. “Is it true that everyone in the prisons is being killed?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

Aghast: “But you’d have to know, they can’t do anything without asking you.”

He put out a hand and pulled her to his side, not in intimacy, but because he wanted to influence the expression on her face. “Supposing it were true, my dear Eléonore, my dear Cornélia, would you cry about it? If you think of the people the Austrians are killing now, driving them out of their farms, burning their roofs over their heads—well, which would you cry for?”

“I don’t question it,” she said. “You couldn’t be wrong.”

“Well, which would you cry for?” He answered himself. “Both.”

Danton sifted through the papers on the Public Prosecutor’s desk. He allowed himself this much familiarity with everyone’s business. In the end it all came back to him.

When he saw the two warrants, he lifted them, and dropped them again. Brissot. Roland. He let them lie, and stared at them, and as his mind moved, slowly, he began to shake from head to foot, as he had on the morning when he was told of the death of his first child. Who had been at the Commune all day? Robespierre. Whose word was law there? His, and Robespierre’s. Who had caused these warrants to be issued? Robespierre. One could call for the minutes, no doubt, one could read and judge the exact words that had brought it to this, one could apportion blame. But it was no more possible that the Commune had done this without Robespierre than that Roland and Brissot should be arrested and survive the night. I must move, he told himself; I must move from this spot.

It was Louvet, Manon Roland’s fair frail novelist friend, who touched his elbow. “Danton,” he said, “Robespierre denounced Brissot by name …”

“So I see.” He picked up the warrants. He turned on Louvet, his voice savage. “Jesus, how could you be such fools? How could I?” He pushed the papers under the man’s nose. “For God’s sake, man, go and hide yourself somewhere.”

He folded the warrants, slipped them into an inside pocket of his coat. “Now then. The little fellow will have to knock me down if he wants these back.”

Color had rushed into Louvet’s face. “There’s another war on now,” he said. “Either we will kill Robespierre, or he will kill us.”

“Don’t ask me to save you.” Danton’s hand in his chest skidded him across the room. “I have my own hide to think of, and the bloody Germans too.”

Pétion picked up the warrants and dropped them, just as Danton had done. “Robespierre authorized them?” Well, he kept saying, well; and again, well. “Danton, does he know? Can he know? That they would be killed?”

“Of course he knows.” Danton sat down and put his head in his hands. “By tomorrow there would have been no government. God knows what he thought he could pull out of it. Has he lost his mind, since I saw him yesterday, or was it intended, calculated—and in that case he is setting himself up as some sort of power, and since ’89 he has been lying to us, not outright, I grant you, but by implication—Pétion, which is it?”

Pétion seemed to be talking to himself, in his rising panic. “I think … that he is better than most of us, yes, certainly better, but now with the pressure of events …” He stopped. He himself was called Brissot’s friend; his natural antipathy to the man had not stopped people sticking the label on him. Since August 10, the Brissotins had governed on sufferance. The pretense was that they had invited Danton into the government; the truth was that he had given them their posts back, and that it was he who imposed his will at every cabinet meeting, sprawling in the great chair once occupied by Capet’s softer bulk. “Danton,” Pétion said, “does Robespierre want my life too?” Danton shrugged; he did not know. Pétion looked away; he seemed ashamed of his thoughts. “Manon said this morning, ‘Robespierre and Danton hold the big knife over us all.’”

“And what answer did you give to the dear woman?”

“We said, after all, Citizeness, Robespierre is only a little clerk.” Danton stood up. “I don’t hold a knife over you. You can tell her that. But there is a knife. And I’m not going to put my neck under it.”

“I don’t see what we did to deserve this,” Pétion said.

“I do. I mean, if I were Robespierre, I would see. You people have studied your own political advantage for so long that you’ve forgotten what you ever wanted the power for. Look, I’ll not defend you—not in public. Camille has been working on me for months about Brissot. So has Marat, in his different way. And Robespierre—oh yes, he’s talked. We thought talking was all he ever did.”

“Robespierre must find out—that you have blocked him.”

“He’s not a dictator.”

Pétion’s affable features were still blank with shock. “Would he be grateful to you, do you think, for saving him from the consequences of an ill-considered action? A moment of wrath?”

“Wrath? He’s never had a moment of wrath. I was wrong to say he must be going mad. You could lock him up in a dungeon for fifty years and he wouldn’t go mad. He’s got everything he needs inside his head.” For a moment he put an outstretched hand on Pétion’s shoulder. “I bet he lives longer than we do.”

When Danton entered his own apartment, massive inside his scarlet coat, his wife gave him one swollen glance of beaten betrayal; she pulled away from his outstretched hands and crossed her arms over her body, as if to hide from him the shape of the child she was carrying.

“You, Gabrielle?” he said. “If only you knew. If only you knew how many people I’ve saved.”

“Get away from me,” she said. “I can hardly bear to be in the same room.

He rang for one of the maids. “Attend to her,” he said.

He crashed his way into the Desmoulins’s apartment. There was only Lucile, sitting quietly with her cat curled up in her lap. Everything had come to the Place des Piques: baby, cat, piano. “I wanted to find Camille—” he said. “No, no, it doesn’t matter.” He dropped to a knee beside her chair. The cat cleared the opposite arm, in one neat, fearful leap. He thought, I’ve seen that cat approach Robespierre, purring: animals can’t know much.

Lucile put out a delicate hand: she touched his cheek, stroked his forehead, so gently that he hardly felt it.

“Lucile,” he said, “let me take you to bed.” God knows, it was not what he meant to say.

She shook her head. “I’d be frightened of you, Georges. And besides, would it be your bed, or ours? The beds themselves are so intimidating. You have the coronet, but we have such a number of gilt cherubim to cope with. We’re always falling foul of their little gilt fists and feet.”

“Lucile, I beg of you. I need you.”

“No, I don’t think you’d like the break with routine. You ask politely, I say no—isn’t that the way it is? Today is not the day. Afterwards you’d confuse it all in your mind with Robespierre. You’d hate me, which I really couldn’t bear.”

“No, no, I wouldn’t.” His tone changed abruptly. “What do you know about Robespierre?”

“It’s surprising what you find out if you just sit still and listen.”

“Camille knew then—he knew, he must have known what Robespierre was going to do?”

Again she touched his face; that touch, and the softness of her voice, were almost reverential. “Don’t ask, Georges. Better not to ask.”

“Don’t you mind? Don’t you mind what we’ve done?”

“Perhaps I mind—but I know I’m part of it. Gabrielle, you see she can’t bear it—she thinks you’ve damned your soul and hers too. But for myself—I think possibly that when I first saw Camille, I was twelve then, twelve or thirteen—I thought, oh, here comes hell. It doesn’t become me to start squealing now. Gabrielle married a nice young lawyer. I didn’t.”

“You can’t persuade me of that—you can’t say you knew what you were getting.”

“One can know. And not know.”

He took her hand, her wrist, gripped it hard. “Lolotte, this cannot go on for much longer. I am not Fréron, I am not Dillon, I am not a man you flirt with, I will not allow you to enjoy yourself at my expense.”

“So, then?”

“And I do mean to have you, you know.”

“Georges, are you threatening me?”

He nodded. “I suppose I am,” he said thoughtfully. “I suppose I must be.” He stood up.

“Well, this is quite a new phase of my existence,” she said. She looked up at him, with a sweet, confident smile. “But you have neglected all the orthodox arts of persuasion, Georges. Is this the best you can do by way of seduction? All you do is glare at me and make the occasional grab. Why don’t you languish? Why don’t you sigh? Why don’t you write me a sonnet?”

“Because I’ve seen where it gets your other beaux,” he said. “Oh, dammit all, girl, this is ridiculous.”

He thought, she wants me really, the bitch. She thought, it takes his mind off things.

He picked up his papers, and went back to his own suite. The cat crept back, and jumped onto her knee and curled up; Lucile stared into the hearth, like an old spinster lady.

Perhaps fourteen hundred people are dead. Compared to the average battlefield, it is a trifle. But think (Lucile does): one life is everything to its possessor, one life is all we have.

The elections for the National Convention were conducted by the usual two-tier system, and, as the nine hundred second-stage Electors walked to their meeting in the hall of the Jacobins, they passed heaps of fresh corpses piled in the street.

There were repeated ballots, until a candidate got an absolute majority. It took a long time. A candidate could offer himself for election in more than one part of the country. It was not necessary to be a French citizen. The variety of candidates was so great that the Electors might have become confused, but Robespierre was always ready to offer guidance. He embraced Danton, tentatively, when Danton was returned with a 91 percent poll in his favor; at least, if you could not say he embraced him, you could say he patted his sleeve. He relished the applause when he himself defeated Pétion in a direct contest, and forced him to seek a provincial seat; it was important to him that the Paris deputies form a solid anti-Brissotin bloc. He was both pleased and anxious when the Paris electors returned his younger brother Augustin; he worried a little in case his family name carried undue influence, but after all, Augustin had worked hard for the revolution in Arras, and it was time for him to make the move to the capital. Help and support for me, he thought. He managed a dazzled smile at the way things were going. He looked younger, for a minute or two.

The journalist Hébert did not receive more than six votes in any one ballot; again Robespierre’s face seemed to open, the tense muscles of his jaw relaxed. Hébert has a certain sansculotte following, although he is known to keep a carriage; Hébert in propria persona is not so important as the image he shelters behind, and thankfully, Père Duchesne the furnace maker will not be puffing his democratic pipe on the Convention’s benches.

But not everything went smoothly … . The English scientist Priestley seemed to be gathering support, in an elector’s rebellion against Marat. “The need now is not for exceptional talent,” Robespierre advised, “and not for foreign talent. It is for men who have hidden in cellars for the sake of the Revolution. And,” he added, “for butchers even.”

He intended no irony. Legendre was safely elected next day. So was Marat.

His protégé Antoine Saint-Just would be in Paris at last, and the Duke of Orléans would be sitting beside the men he had once paid and patronized. Having cast about for a surname, the Duke had adopted the one the people had stuck on him, half in mockery; he was now Philippe Égalité.

A hint of trouble on September 8: “Some jumped-up Brissotin intellectual,” Legendre said, “this Kersaint, has polled enough votes to stop Camille coming through on the first ballot. What are we going to do about it?”

“Don’t upset yourself,” Danton said soothingly. “Better the jumped-up intellectual you know, eh?” He had quite expected the Electors to resist handing the nation’s affairs over to Camille. Kersaint wasn’t, anyway, what he called an intellectual; he was a naval officer from Brittany, had sat in the last Assembly.

Robespierre said, “Citizen Legendre, if there is a conspiracy to stop Camille’s election, I shall quash it.”

“Now wait a minute …” Legendre said. His objection tailed off, but he looked uneasy. He hadn’t mentioned a conspiracy; but Citizen Robespierre has this hair-trigger mechanism. “What will you do?” he asked.

“I shall propose that until the elections are over, an hour a day be given to a public discussion of the candidates’ merits.”

“Oh, a discussion,” Legendre said, relieved. For a moment he’d thought Robespierre might be planning to put a warrant out for Kersaint. Last week, you’d known what kind of a man you were dealing with; this week, you didn’t know. It put him up in your estimation, in a way.

Danton grinned. “You’d better make a list of Camille’s merits, and circulate it. We aren’t all so inventive as you. I don’t know how you’d justify Camille, except under the heading ‘exceptional talent.’”

“You do want him elected?” Robespierre demanded.

“Of course. I want someone to talk to during the boring debates.”

“Then don’t sit there laughing.”

Camille said, “I wish you wouldn’t discuss me as if I weren’t here.” On the next ballot, Citizen Kersaint, who before had received 230 votes, now mysteriously found that he had only thirty-six. Robespierre shrugged. “One does try to persuade people, of course. There’s no more to it than that. Congratulations, my dear.” For some reason, an image comes into his head, of Camille at twelve or thirteen years old: a violent, whimsical child, given to stormy outbreaks of tears.

Meanwhile the volunteers, in their thousands, march to the front singing. They have sausages and loaves of bread stuck on the end of their bayonets. Women give them kisses and bunches of flowers. Do you remember how it used to be when the recruiting sergeant came to a village? No one hides now. People are scraping the walls of their cellars for saltpeter to make gunpowder. Women are giving their wedding rings to the Treasury to be melted down. Many of them, of course, will be taking advantage of the new laws to get divorced.

“Pikes?” Camille said.

“Pikes,” Fabre said sullenly.

“I don’t wish to appear legalistic, a pettifogger as it were, but is it the business of the Minister of Justice to purchase pikes? Does Georges-Jacques know we’ve got a bill for pikes?”

“Oh, come on, do you think I can go running to the minister with every trifling expense?”

“When you add it all up,” Camille pushed his hair back, “we’ve spent a lot of money over the past few weeks. It worries me to think that now we’re all deputies there’ll be new ministers soon, and they’ll want to know where the money has gone. Because really, I haven’t the least idea. I don’t suppose you have?”

“Anything that causes difficulty,” Fabre said “you just put down as ‘Secret Fund.’ Then nobody asks any questions, because they can’t, you see—it’s secret. Don’t worry so much. Everything’s all right as long as you don’t lose the Great Seal. You haven’t lost it, have you?”

“No. At least, I saw it somewhere this morning.”

“Good—now look, shall we reimburse ourselves a bit? What about that money Manon Roland is supposed to be getting for her ministry to issue news sheets?”

“Oh yes. Georges told her that she’d better ask me nicely to edit them.”

“He did, I was there. She said perhaps her husband would see you, and decide if you were suitable. Our minister, he began to bellow and paw the ground.”

They laughed. “Well, then,” Camille said. “One Treasury warrant …” His hand moved over his desk. “Claude taught me this … they never query anything, you know, if it has Danton’s signature.”

“I know,” Fabre said.

“What did I do with the signature stamp? I lent it to Marat. I hope he brings it back.”

“Speaking of Queen Coco,” Fabre said, “have you noticed anything different in her manner lately?”

“How could I? You know I’m forbidden the presence.”

“Oh yes, of course you are. Well, let me tell you … There’s a certain lightness in the step, a certain bloom on the cheek—what does that betoken?”

“She’s in love.”

Fabre is now around forty years years old. He is neat, pale, built on economic lines: actor’s eyes, actor’s hands. Bits of his autobiography emerge, late at night, in no particular chronological order. No wonder nothing fazes him. In Namur once, aided by army-officer friends, he eloped with a fifteen-year-old girl called Catiche; he did it, he explains, to preserve her virginity from the girl’s own father. Better that he should have it … . They had been apprehended; Catiche had been hastily married off, he had been sentenced to hang. How is it, then, that he lives to tell the tale? All these years on, and with so much excitement in between, he can hardly remember. Camille says, “Georges-Jacques, we have lived sheltered lives, you and me.”

“Monk-like,” the minister agrees.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Fabre says modestly.

Fabre follows the minister as he stamps through public buildings, his large hands slapping backs and desktops, wringing the necks of all compromise solutions, all the tried and tested methods, all the decent ways of doing things. Power becomes him, fits him like an old topcoat; his little eyes glitter if anyone tries to dispute with him. Fabre feeds his ego in all the unsubtle ways he likes best; they are comfortable together, sit up drinking and discussing shady inter-departmental deals. When dawn comes, Danton find himself alone with the map of Europe.

Fabre is limited, he complains, he makes me waste my time. But his company is never exacting, and the minister is used to him, and he is always there when he’s wanted.

This morning the minister was thoughtful, chin on fist. “Fabre, have you ever planned a robbery?”

Fabre darted at him a look of alarm.

“No,” Danton said good-humoredly, “I know petty criminality is a pastime of yours. We’ll come to that later. No, I need your help, because I want to steal the Crown Jewels. Yes, do sit down.”

“Perhaps, Danton, a word of explanation?”

“You’re entitled to that—but I want no ifs or buts. Use your imagination. I do. Now, consider the Duke of Brunswick.”

“Brunswick—”

“Spare me your Jacobin diatribe—I’ve heard it. The truth is that Brunswick, as a man, is not wholly unsympathetic to us. The July manifesto wasn’t his—the Austrians and the Prussians made him sign it. Think about him. He’s an intelligent man. He’s a forward-looking man. He has no tears to waste on the Bourbons. He is also a very rich man. He is a great soldier. But to the allies he is—what? A mercenary.”

“What does he aspire to be?”

“Brunswick knows as well as I do that France isn’t ready for republican government. The people may not want Louis or his brothers, but they want a King, because Kings are what they understand, and sooner or later the nation will fall to a King, or to a dictator who will make himself King. Ask Robespierre, if you don’t think I’m right. Now there might have been circumstances in which—having established a constitution—we were scouring Europe for some reasonably regal old buffer to come and uphold it. Brunswick would perhaps word it differently—but there is no doubt that he wished to play that role.”

“Robespierre alleged this.” (And you, Fabre thought, pretended not to believe it.) “But then in July, with the manifesto—”

“Brunswick wrecked his chances. We use him as a swear word. Why did the allies make him put his name on their manifesto? Because they need him. They wanted to make him hated here, so that his personal ambitions were quashed, and he was secured to their service.”

“They succeeded. So what about it?”

“The situation’s not—irretrievable. You see, I’ve considered whether Brunswick might be bought off. I’ve asked General Dumouriez to open negotiations.”

Fabre drew in his breath. “You’re reckless with our lives. We’re in Dumouriez’s hands now.”

“That’s possible, but that’s not the issue. The issue is the result for France, not the unfinished business between me and the general. Because … it appears that Brunswick can be bought off.”

“Well, he’s human, isn’t he? He isn’t Robespierre, or even the Virtuous Roland, as the newspapers call the Minister of the Interior.”

“Don’t banter,” Danton said. Suddenly he grinned. “I take your point. We do have a few saints on our side. Well, when they’re dead, the French will be able to march into battle with their relics for protection. In lieu of cannon, of which we are rather short.”

“What does Brunswick want? How much?”

“His requirements are specific. He wants diamonds. Did you know he collects them? We know, don’t we, what lust diamonds can inspire? We have the example, dear to our hearts, of the woman Capet.”

“But I can hardly believe—”

Danton cut him off with a gesture. “We steal the Crown Jewels. We convey to Brunswick the stones he especially covets, and we allow the others to be recovered. For use on future occasions.”

“Can the thing be done?”

Danton scowled. “Do you think I’d have got so deep in, if it couldn’t? The theft itself would pose very few problems, for professionals, if they have a bit of help from us. A few slipups on the security side. A few blunders with the investigation.”

“But all that—the security of the jewels, the investigation—all that would come under Roland’s jurisdiction.”

“The Virtuous Roland will fall in with our scheme. After he’s been told a certain amount about it, after he’s implicated, he won’t be able to betray us without betraying himself. I will bring him to that point, I will make sure he has the knowledge he doesn’t want to have—you can leave that to me. But in fact, what he knows will be very little—we’ll wrap the affair up so that he has to guess who is involved and who isn’t. If things get difficult, we’ll stick him with the blame. After all, as you say, his department is responsible.”

“But he’d simply say, Danton originated this—”

“If he lived long enough.”

Fabre stared. “You are a different man, Danton.”

“No, Fabre, I am a filthy patriot, as I always have been. What I am buying from Brunswick is one battle, one battle for our poor underfed barefoot soldiers. Is that wrong?”

“The means …”

“The means I will set out to you, and I have no time to waste discussing ends. I want no cant about justification. The justification is the saving of the country.”

“For what?” Fabre looked stupefied. “Saving it for what?”

Danton’s face darkened. “If this day fortnight an Austrian soldier takes you by the throat and says, ‘Do you want to live?’ will you say, ‘For what?’”

Fabre looked away. “Yes …” he muttered. “To survive at all will be the thing now. And Brunswick is willing to lose a battle—with his reputation at stake?”

“It will be managed so that he doesn’t lose face. He knows what he’s doing. So do 1. Now, Fabre, some professional criminals. I have contacts already, which you must follow up. They mustn’t know who they’re working for. They will all be,” he waved a hand, “dispensable. We can allow Roland to direct the police in a certain amount of inept investigation. Of course, we can expect the matter to be taken very seriously. Death penalty.”

“What’s to stop them talking at their trial? Because we may need to let the police catch somebody.”

“As far as you can, make sure they have nothing to talk about. We shall have a blanket of obfuscation between each stratum of this conspiracy, and between each conspirator. So see to that. Obfuscate. If anyone should begin to suspect government involvement, the trail should lead to Roland. Now, there are two people in particular who must know nothing of this. One is Roland’s wife. The woman is innocent of practical politics, and very loud-mouthed. The trouble is, he doesn’t seem able to keep anything from her.”

“The other person is Camille,” Fabre said. “Because he would tell Robespierre, and Robespierre would call us traitors for talking to Brunswick at all.”

Danton nodded. “I can’t divide Camille’s loyalties. Who knows? He might make the wrong choice.”

“But both of them are in a position to find out so much.”

“That’s a risk we take. Now, I can buy one battle—and by doing so, I can hope to turn the tide of the war. But after that I can’t remain in office. I would be open to blackmail, by Brunswick or more likely by—”

“General Dumouriez.”

“Quite. Oh, I know you don’t like the odds, Fabre. But consider yourself. I don’t know how much you’ve embezzled from the ministry in the past few weeks, but I take it to be more than a trifle. I—let us say as long as your ambitions remain on a reasonable scale—I won’t thwart them. You are thinking, what use will Danton be to me out of office? But Fabre, war is so lucrative. You’ll never be far from power now. Inside information … just imagine. I know what you’re worth to me.”

Fabre swallowed. He looked away. His eyes seemed unfocused. “Do you ever think, does it ever bother you … that everything is founded on lies?”

“That’s a dangerous thing to say. I don’t like that.”

“No, I didn’t mean on your part, I was asking … on my own account … to see if one might compare experiences.” He smiled wanly; for the first time in all the years he’d known him, Danton saw him at a loss, mystified, a man whose life has been taken out of his control. He looked up. “It’s nothing,” he said lightly. “I didn’t mean anything, Danton.”

“You can’t afford to speak without thinking. No one must know the truth about this, not in a thousand years. The French are going to win a battle, that’s all. Your silence is the price of mine, and neither of us breaks the silence, even to save our own lives.”